A Right Turn on Immigration in the United Kingdom Foretold Mass Riots. Does a Right Turn on Immigration in the United States Foretell the Same?
Anti-ICE protestors gather in Washington DC’s Lafayette Square, October 2017. Photo courtesy of Victoria Pickering.
On July 29, 2024, three young girls were killed in a knife attack in the coastal British town of Southport. Within hours, a man named Eddie Murray inaccurately posted on LinkedIn that the attack’s perpetrator was a migrant. LinkedIn removed the post, deeming it a violation of the platform’s misinformation policy, but by then, it was too late. Over two million people had seen Murray’s testimony proclaiming the Southport attacker to be a migrant.
A whirlwind of misinformation, some of it disseminated by members of far-right groups like the English Defence League, rapidly proliferated across social media. Some netizens spread rumors that the attacker’s name was Ali Al-Shakati and that he had arrived illegally in the UK in 2023.
Within days, riots ensued, featuring vicious petrol bomb attacks on mosques and bricks thrown at hotels housing migrants waiting for their asylum claims to be processed. While the spread of misinformation certainly amplified the attacks, the intense violence aimed at British Muslims over the days that followed was just an extension of existing trends: Muslims are by far the likeliest of any demographic in the UK to suffer a religious hate crime. Government data reveals that in 2023, the 3,400 hate crimes committed against British Muslims represented around 44 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes in the country, far surpassing the next-closest demographic, British Jews. 52 percent of Britons believe that the country is receiving too many migrants, and 42 percent believe that British Muslims are not loyal to the UK. In this charged environment, they are an easy target for segments of the public to project generalized anger onto. Indeed, while the rioters’ violence was broadly unpopular, there remains deep resonance among the British public with the rioters. Although 82 percent of Brits polled called the riots unjustified, 58 percent of respondents expressed sympathy “for the views of those peacefully taking part in [the] demonstrations that were ostensibly triggered by the Southport murders.”
Political conflict over immigration is not new to the United Kingdom. Outsized anger toward migrants comes on the heels of an escalating migrant crisis all British political parties are seeking to remedy. The conditions that led to the Southport Riots mirror the conditions we see in the United States, where the public has turned further against immigration and political leaders are scrambling to restrict the southern border in response.
With anti-migrant hate crimes already on the rise, the United States is on track to replicate the UK’s escalating anti-migrant social crisis. We are poised to see a considerable increase in anti-immigrant violence in the near future, but a course correction is possible.
Social Rupture: Immigration in the United Kingdom
With the 2014 European migrant crisis in the foreground, immigration has become one of the most contested political questions in the United Kingdom over the last decade. In 2019, the UK Conservative Party ran on a moderate reduction in overall immigration with a strong push for the immigration of skilled workers.
In 2022, an uptick in migrant boat crossings in the English Channel—from fewer than 10,000 in 2020 to nearly 50,000 in 2022—brought immigration back into the center of political conversation. At a time when inflation was crushing the nation, the influx of people proved to be a significant social challenge. In April 2020, the number of Britons who had identified immigration as one of the key issues facing British society dipped to a twenty-year low at 5 percent—but by June 2023, that number surged to 21 percent.
There was also a clear racial distinction: Brits were far more likely to say the government should allow many or some immigrants from Australia (62 percent) or France (51 percent) than Pakistan (31 percent) or Nigeria (30 percent). Notably, the latter two nations are both plurality Muslim. With violence toward residents of predominantly Muslim communities proliferating after the Southport attack, the public’s particular hostility to migrants from these nations is especially pertinent. Thus, even prior to the Southport attack, Brits had already been primed to anger towards Muslim migrants for.
In April 2022, the UK Conservative Party, in power under then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, announced a proposal to relocate asylum seekers to Rwanda, with the stated intention of “[deterring] people from making dangerous journeys to the UK to claim asylum, which are facilitated by criminal smugglers.” Pinning the nation’s economic anxiety squarely on migrants, Johnson blamed “uncontrolled immigration” for long wait times at the National Health Service, overcrowding in local schools, and a critical shortage of housing. Johnson further called this type of immigration “particularly perverse,” claiming that “seven out of ten of those arriving in small boats last year were…paying people smugglers to queue jump.”
While rejecting the “Rwanda plan” as an “expensive gimmick,” UK Labour Party Leader and then Leader of the Opposition Keir Starmer made clear this past June that he was open to the mass deportation of asylum seekers. In a speech to the House of Commons, he pledged to “on the first few days of government…[have] planes going off.” Starmer explicitly identified “people coming from countries like Bangladesh” as an example of migrants who “will go back to the countries where people come from.” Both parties went into the election on an explicitly anti-immigration pitch to voters. In the July 4 election, Labour swept their way into power, promising to “reduce the reliance on overseas workers” and cut net immigration.
Only three weeks later, with Starmer’s harshly criticized comments on Bangladeshi Brits beginning to recede into the nation’s long-term memory, the Southport attacks sparked riots across the United Kingdom.
Descent Into Crisis: Immigration in the United States
Conversations surrounding immigration have dominated political discourse in the United States for decades. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, has an extensive and well-documented history of “[denying] detained migrants access to adequate healthcare,” leaking confidential data of immigrant detainees, and allowing mass sexual violence within its facilities. Broadly speaking, the Democratic Party has long championed comprehensive immigration reform, while the Republican Party has favored broad restrictions on immigration.
In the months after President Joe Biden took office in 2021, the number of undocumented immigration at the southern border surged. Between 2019 and 2022, the estimated number of undocumented immigrants in the United States rose from 10.2 million to 11 million, while monthly migrant encounters by US Border Patrol agents peaked in December 2023 at 249,741 after a twenty-year low of 16,182 in April 2020.
Amidst border towns’ overwhelming influx of asylum seekers, Americans nationwide were consumed by economic anxiety over accelerating inflation. Like in the United Kingdom, economic unease and a surge in new migrants coincided with the prevalence of anti-immigration sentiment. In June 2024, 55 percent of Americans registered as preferring a decrease in immigration, significantly up from 41 percent the year before, and the first time since December 2005 that the majority of Americans preferred a decrease in immigration.
In the face of this groundswell of public sentiment, Washington faced urgent pressure for a policy response just as their British counterparts had a few years earlier. Senate Democrats, in a deal with Republican Senators like James Lankford and Thom Tillis, pushed forward a border security package that expanded the US Border Patrol’s budget and made it more difficult for migrants to seek asylum. Though President Trump rebuked and ultimately killed it, the bill represented the emergence of a new, bipartisan consensus for restricting immigration. Similarly, Starmer’s comments on the repatriation of migrants signaled an openness to the deportation-heavy approach of the Rwanda plan, despite Starmer withdrawing the latter once elected. Mirroring the Lankford bill, the United Kingdom’s emergent consensus for restricting immigration is bipartisan.
Reminiscent of Starmer’s comments about Bangladeshis, Democrats have also escalated from their prior rhetoric and begun to emphasize the importance of restricting immigration. In the recent presidential election, Vice President Kamala Harris repeatedly touted her credentials as a border state prosecutor as evidence of her commitment to border security. During his 2024 State of the Union address, President Biden made public reference to a Georgia medical student allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant, saying, “Lincoln Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal [...] to her parents, I say my heart goes out to you.” Using the term “illegal” and highlighting an incident allegedly committed by an undocumented immigrant betrays the rhetoric he employed as a candidate, and reflects a larger rhetorical shift against undocumented immigrants in the Democratic Party
As in the United Kingdom, public perception of how immigration impacts society has sharpened in recent years. 64 percent of Americans polled believe that immigration is making crime worse, 56 percent believe that migrants are making the economy worse, and 47 percent believe the same about social and cultural values.
This spike in anti-migrant sentiment has not been restricted to the realm of sentiment alone. In October 2024, the Haitian-American community in Springfield, Ohio was inundated by bomb threats and online vitriol that shut down local schools after former President Trump accused Haitians of eating cats and dogs in the Presidential debate. One month later, Trump was again elected to the Presidency on a platform of anti-immigrant sentiment. This most recent incident tracks with an existing increase in anti-migrant hate. Hate crimes reported to the FBI have risen for five consecutive years in a row; while anti-Latino hate crimes increased by 41 percent in 2021 and have continued to rise, especially in major cities; isolated urban protests against temporary migrant shelters, such as those in New York City, have also been seen across the United States in the last two years.
A recent surge in migrants entering the country has caused a sharp turn in public sentiment against immigration and a dramatic shift in how politicians are talking about the issue. In the United Kingdom, this precise sequence of events precipitated mass riots in the wake of the Southport attacks. Anti-migrant violence in the United States is already on the rise. With an incoming President who has unapologetically spread conspiracy theories about migrant communities, the United States is already replicating an insidious social pattern that will culminate in violence if action is not taken.
A Path Forward
The only way to prevent violent, anti-migrant unrest is an urgent course correction on immigration. Resistance to immigration continues to be a corollary for economic anxiety. In both Britain and the United States, public sentiment turned against immigration as post-pandemic inflation was at an all-time high and communities struggled to accommodate the influx of new migrants. This makes the task of realigning public opinion on immigration difficult. In order to do so, Congress must entertain serious policy solutions to crises such as the opioid epidemic as well as the housing and cost-of-living crises squeezing Americans.
But to prevent further escalation of the social backlash against migrants, political leaders must first stop fueling anti-immigrant sentiment. Tailing Republican immigration rhetoric has neither shifted public opinion nor moved the American public closer to the Democrats on border policy; the American public preferred Trump to Harris by a thirteen point margin on immigration. However, a majority of Americans continue to support allowing undocumented immigrants to stay on the condition of employment. Articulating how immigration supplements the labor force and sustains strategic industries across the economy is critical to turning the tide of public opinion. Democrats must assert a positive economic case for immigration and its benefits for Americans in order to alter the trajectory of the nation’s escalating social crisis. This positive case is the best way to prevent the violent unrest against migrants seen in the United Kingdom from manifesting in the United States.
Ethan Eblaghie (CC ’28) is a staff writer for CPR from Baltimore, MD. He is studying sociology and is an organizer with Columbia YDSA.